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crimeandpunishment writes "This real-life clash of the titans could be much more interesting than the movie. Today Google fired the latest volley in its war of words with Apple over mobile advertising. In a blog posting, the head of Google's mobile ad service, Admob, had harsh words for Apple's new restrictions concerning the iPhone and iPad ... calling them a threat to competition. There's a lot of money at stake ... the US mobile ad market, which is about $600 million, is expected to more than double by 2013."

I wasn't saying that I support the decision, simply that it's not exactly surprising that Apple doesn't want Google to get advertising revenue generated through their handset. The relationship between the two has become increasingly hostile over the last couple of years, so while it's an unpleasant move, it's NOT a surprise.

The main block Apple has put up is that user location can't be given out to advertisers outside of the iAd system, it is probably going to be pushed as a privacy issue.
Not having used iOS 4, I can't really say if this is a good thing or a bad thing overall, but I do like knowing that there are restrictions in place on who gets to handle what info about me.
Personally, I have location awareness turned off so this doesn't really apply much to me, but the idea is the same.

This isn't a monopoly move either, Apple isn't forcing anything on anyone outside their own platform to do anything. Apple is doing the same thing cable and satellite providers have been doing all along. . . picking and choosing who gets to advertise where and how.

How are they supposed to know how much to charge or how much to pay out if they aren't legally permitted to know how many users are being exposed to ads, how long the exposure is, what click-through/tap-through rates are, etc?

They are allowed to count click throughs. They just aren't allowed to pass any information about the user/device/location, that's all.

And what you're missing is that the dictionary definition of monopoly has little to do with the legal definition. Now I'm not saying either party is right or wrong, but to just read out a dictionary definition and say Apple are in the right because of this strict interpretation ignores the fact that that's not how monopoly law works. There are many complexities to consider in both establishing, first, if there is an effective monopoly (and this doesn't mean you have to control the entire market, just enough of it to give you the ability to shut down competition, ala MS insisting in the past that hardware vendors had to buy a license for each machine they sold, even if it wasn't going to run windows, effectively negating the zero price point of open source alternatives - sure there were alternative OS vendors the hardware manufacturers could use, but they'd be shutting themselves out of the biggest market, ergo effective monopoly), and second, if there is an actual abuse of that monopoly. It's by no means not as clear cut as either side is claiming it to be.

First, this is Jobs (reality distortion fields envelop those emanating them), so no, they don't have 28%. Not even close. What do the other manufacturers claim they have? RIM is still number one. Android is growing much faster than Apple is, or did.

And don't tell me to look at market share, RIM and Nokia are both running on inertia, it's only a matter of time before they fall.The iphone platform is becoming the "standard" for mobile apps, much like Windows is on the desktop.

I for one do not want a repeat of Windows, especially not with Apple.Those bastards are worse than Microsoft when it come to choice.

Living under the dictatorship of Steve Jobs, where you can't have something unless the Führer approves, would suck balls.

Fortunately things like the HTC phones and the new Samsung Galaxy S gives me a tad bit of hope.Still they need to step it up a notch.

It's not a monopoly when, not only do they not have a controlling share of the market, they also don't have the largest share of the market. In legal terms, antitrust starts to apply when you have enough of a market share to act as if you had a monopoly (e.g. you can raise prices arbitrarily).

When you have a minority of the market, you can do whatever you want with your closed platform, because it won't (seriously) distort the market. Apple could, for example, require you to buy a beret and turtleneck with your iPhone, and that would be completely legal.

Of course, just because something is legal doesn't mean that you're not an asshat for doing it. I can walk up to you in the street and call you an idiot, but I suspect that neither of us would endorse or condone that kind of behaviour just because it happens not to be illegal.

I think you'll find if you look at the underlying codebase that the lion's share of development was still done as KHTML

Spoken like someone who has never looked at the code. If you exclude:

The JavaScript engine.

Most of the SVG support.

Most of the DOM stuff.

Most of the CSS support.

All of the HTML 5 stuff (canvas, websocket, and so on).

then yes, most of it was done as part of KHTML. If you look at KHTML now, you'll see a lot of changes back-ported from WebKit. If you compare WebKit now to KHTML in 2002 (when WebKit was forked), you won't see very much common code at all. When WebKit was forked, KHTML was about 140KLoC. According to Ohloh.net, WebKit now is 715K lines of C++, 75K lines of ObjC, 34K lines of C, and a lot of various other things. Even if Apple had retained 100% of the KHTML code, it would now account for 10% of the total codebase. In reality, large chunks have been rewritten (KJS, for example), so it's now less than 5%.